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Whenever a large games company talks about "developer choice" you know they're referring to one of a few things:
This initiative sure would make things more complicated for the game publishers, yes.
Because they're currently not doing the bare minimum.
If they weren't so accustomed to not doing the bare minimum, maybe they would have different opinions! Just saying.
Edit: Just signed the petition. Didn't think this was necessary before because, as soon as I heard of it, Finland was already top of the list percentage wise. But I did sign it, just for the hell yeah of it.
It's not just for the hell of it!
Invalid votes will be removed when it's time for the final tally, so the initiative needs a solid buffer to still he over a million after.
There's been a talk of some people using bots to inflate the numbers in a misguided attempt to help the initiative, so every vote is still very welcome.
Also, I kinda want to see just how high Finland can go above the threshold.
Tell your friends!
"Won't somebody PLEASE think of the ~~children~~ devs!?"
The last refuge of a dying argument 😴
The devs would probably prefer if their work for several years wasn't thrown in the trash. It's the publishers and suits killing games.
Why are publishers speaking for devs about how much choice devs would have? Why not get devs to speak?
Because sometimes publishers like to be the ones cuetailing dev choices
Because most devs are just codemonkeys implementing what they're told to. This is pure manipulative propaganda from the suits who are already robbing wages from good devs.
Curtailing developer choice is rather the point, no?
Yeah just the choices that fucks over paying customers. They are saying they would like to keep doing that and this laws would curtail that.
Will someone think of the poor shareholders? /s
Giant corporations have proven no amount of profit is too much. There needs to be some guardrails. And some form of preservation of the games your loyal customers have enriched your company to access.
It's almost like government was made to create and enforce those guardrails.
Oh no?! It developer's choices vs purchaser's options. Who will win, it's a mystery only time can solve. Just kidding, we all know who the courts will side with, as it is never "the people".
Yeah, because the choices they have now is working great for quality games...
Yes, it curtails you from making absurd choices about how to fuck customers out of the money they paid for your games
Backpedaling to "defending creators" - that's a bold move, Cotton.
Lol. We're gamers. We know that if we encounter enemies we're going in the right direction.
Still trying to find the right direction on animal crossing.
Towards the bees!
paying your debts. The game breaks as it cannot speculate anymore on your debt
they say "developer choice" because they know those words have positive connotations but what they mean is "publisher greed"
If it means developers won’t make “live-service”/trash games anymore, we should hasten the SKG movement.
FPS games with community servers coming back is my dream
Only server browser, no matchmaking.
They still will, this will just limit their ability to force you to move to the next one once the servers shut down.
Most likely, if they are forced to allow public servers after they shut down the official ones, they will pull some other bullshit. Like claim the game is still available, but the 300$ cosmetics you bought are not allowed on public servers because they are separate from the game.
Honestly I'd even prefer that because it diminishes the value of in game purchases and would be a step towards getting rid of them as well.
They should be compelled to either make those cosmetics available for everyone or have some technical means to prove ownership (e.g. blockchain or cryptographically signed file). You can't lose stuff you bought just because the publisher shut down the servers.
"curtail developer choice" is such a weak argument because you could equally apply it to literally every piece of regulation ever passed. Of course it curtails choice, that's almost the dictionary definition of an industry regulation.
The original article completely misrepresents the initiative:
We appreciate the passion of our community; however, the decision to discontinue online services is multi-faceted, never taken lightly and must be an option for companies when an online experience is no longer commercially viable. We understand that it can be disappointing for players but, when it does happen, the industry ensures that players are given fair notice of the prospective changes in compliance with local consumer protection laws.
Private servers are not always a viable alternative option for players as the protections we put in place to secure players’ data, remove illegal content, and combat unsafe community content would not exist and would leave rights holders liable. In addition, many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only; in effect, these proposals would curtail developer choice by making these video games prohibitively expensive to create.
...
Stop Killing Games is not trying to force companies to provide private servers or anything like that, but leave the game in a playable state after shutting off servers. This can mean:
Of course, releasing server code is an option.
The expectation is:
That didn't restrict design decisions, it just places a requirement when the game is discontinued. If companies know this going in, they can plan ahead for their exit, just like we expect for mining companies (they're expected to fill in holes and make it look nice once they're done).
I argue Stop Killing Games doesn't go far enough, and if it's pissing off the games industry as well, then that means it strikes a good balance.
Another part of it is that if they discontinue support, they can’t stop the community from creating their own server software.
There are so many ways to approach this. The point is ensuring consumers retain the right to keep using what they purchased, even if they have to support it themselves.
Sort of. They need to have the tools as well. So I suppose they could release the APIs for their servers before shutting down their servers so community servers can be created, that would probably be sufficient. But they need to do something beyond just saying, "we won't sue you if you reverse engineer it."
And "would leave rights holders liable" is completely false, no game would have offline modes if it did